Fifty years ago even the most avant-garde science fiction had not envisaged such global predicaments – not, at least, ones of anthropogenic origin. Today they dominate the international agenda.

Given the advance of science, both in creating new problems and in detecting them, we can expect many more such threats to our planet’s life support systems to hit the headlines soon.

Unfortunately, the political systems that govern decision making at the international or national levels were created more than 50 years ago. They are not designed to handle such issues effectively, much less systemically.

Global problems have local causes. And vice versa: global changes also cause local impacts. And they are complicated: most of the effects result from remote causes – some indirect, others multiple.

Worse, the global and the local lie in different jurisdictions. Worse still, those who get the benefits from the activities that cause the problems are different from those who will have to pay the costs.

Climate change and biodiversity loss will cause human suffering and damage in developing countries that will far exceed their impacts on industrialised ones. Dozens of nation states will cease to exist as the sea level rises. Hundreds of millions of livelihoods will vanish with the extinction of species and habitats. Global environmental change is very much a developing country problem and its urgency is fully recognised by them.

But, then, so are poverty, deprivation and marginalisation. All must be dealt with urgently, but some even more urgently than others. That is why the agreements at the 1992 Earth Summit included not only the Conventions on Climate Change and Biodiversity but also Agenda 21 – the sustainable development strategy designed to address the poverty-related issues. It was a single, indivisible package, and the bill accepted by the international community for Agenda 21 was US$ 125 billion, in addition to the US$ 80 billion a year that then constituted Official Development Assistance (ODA).

The trouble is that the priorities for external funding, which in turn leverage large financial flows at the national level, are set by northern donors. With their perception of their own self-interest, they have clearly weighed in with their preferences for dealing with the issues of the global environment. In the six years since Rio, ODA has declined by 40 per cent instead of rising by the promised 150 per cent. The funds allocated for global environmental issues have, on the other hand, multiplied manifold.

Ironically, on any time frame beyond the immediate decade ahead of us, this trend goes against the interests not only of the South, but also actually of the North.

If human populations continue to grow (as they do in the South) and economies continue to expand (as they do in the North), we can be sure that it will not take many years to reach worldwide environmental disaster.

To make matters worse, the growth of southern populations is deeply and inextricably connected with the expansion of northern economies. The two are flip sides of the same coin. High birth rates and large families are directly associated with poverty, the world over. High levels of material and energy consumption are the direct cause of environmental destruction, the world over. Given the structure of today’s global economy, consumption can only increase if the costs of production are kept low – which means exploiting labour and mining natural resources: more poverty and more environmental destruction. This is the economic-ecological cycle that tightly links population growth in the poorer countries with economic expansion in the rich ones.

In 50 years from now, carbon emissions and biodiversity loss will still be directly correlated with the number of people on the planet and their consumption levels. The larger the number of people, the higher their materials and energy use, the greater the planetary destruction.